October 16, 2005

It's been a few days since I have posted an update...  So much has happened that I don't really know where to start.

I have built a total of 3 grave jumpers now.  One of them sold and I shipped it off on Thursday.  The new owner emailed me tonight to let me know that it arrived and that everything is great.  Hopefully I'll get some pictures from him after Halloween.  The third grave jumper I built for use here at the house.

Here's a shot of grave jumper #2 that was shipped off.  I thought that I'd post a picture of what one looks like all ready to go.  The arms are padded with pipe insulation to give them some bulk.
Grave jumper #3 hiding behind a new grave stone that I've been working on.
Here's the grave stone with a coat of grey acrylic paint on it. I got really sick (extremely sore throat and painful headache) from the fumes.  I made the mistake of painting inside and didn't have enough ventilation, so I paid the price and now can hardly swallow.

I have a new project that I'm working on now.  It's for a little pizza place just down the road from our house.  I had an idea for a pop up barrel prop made to look kind of like a huge pizza sauce can and the owners of the pizza place liked the idea too...

I couldn't find another barrel at Home Depot, so I did some searching and came across one at a local building resale shop.  It was in bad shape, but Becky and I did some scrubbing and scraping and cut the top off.  We managed to get it looking half way decent.
I did a lot of searching on the internet for a simple pizza sauce can, but didn't find anything I was looking for, so I ended up making one up from scratch. The image on the right was what I came up with as a template.
I started out by putting the white base on.  The paint really didn't want to stick to the barrel even though we scrubbed it clean and rough sanded it to give the paint something to bite into. I was really worried about the end result at this point because of the paint problems, but the prop only has to last a few weeks and the timeline is short on this one.
The red took 45 minutes to spray on.  I bought 3 cans of red paint and it took all of them to get a good coat on that covered the blue of the barrel.  After can #2 I got a blister on my finger and switched to another one...  Now I have 3 fingers with blisters <laughing>.
A touch of metallic silver on the top and bottom along with the black stripe and it looks a bit like a Campbell's Soup can.
I decided to put the letting and graphic on using vinyl.  It's only a few words and a medium sized graphic, so I decided to do it by hand instead of taking the project to a sign shop to have a machine cut it out for me.
It took me about an hour or so to cut all of the lettering and the graphic.  I think the graphic turned out pretty nice.
Becky helped me to line up the graphic and gave me some support while I applied the lettering. The mostly finished pizza sauce can...  Hard to imagine that only a few hours earlier the it was an ugly blue barrel.
I did a quick test fit of my existing barrel pop-up.  Unfortunately, the new barrel is a bit narrower than my toxic waste barrel.  I'll have to make some adjustments to get it to work correctly.

Well, sorry that it's not a really detailed update, but It's late and I've got a ton of work to do tomorrow...